Month: August 2018

Okay, tons of bugfixes in here. Fixes, fixes, fixes, all the live long day. I’m pleased with the result, though.

Mercenaries in particular have been made vastly more functional, and seem to work mostly correctly now. They just hadn’t had a chance to be fully tested previously, and so they needed to go through the wringer of testing like any other new feature. Thanks for being a part of the first wave of that and helping us save some time internally, for those who did — it really means a lot.

A cool side benefit of some of the changes to how things are seeded on the map is that now not only do things seed in a prettier fashion, and spread out better on planets than before, but it actually generates faster and thus cuts lag in the lobby way down when you’re generating a new seed, etc.

One of the really big things in this build, also mercenary-related, are the six new mercenary factions created by RocketAssistedPuffin. Badger created the other five or so factions, so between them they’ve created quite a pretty few. We need to get the costs on Badger’s to go up out of the token amount range, and I forgot to do that today, but it’s on my list now that I thought of it again.

More coming tomorrow (Friday), and then possibly a bit Sunday, before we start all over with more releases next week. Friday is a half-day for me because I have some personal things to attend to in the morning, but then I’ll be back up and at it for the afternoon. Thanks for your support!

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you’ll be notified about any game releases we do.

Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn’t have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that’s how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.

As the title suggests, this release increases your ship caps by a ton. 3x for all of the smaller fleetships, to be precise. The AI and other factions are unaffected; you were simply being outgunned in an unfair way. Your caps for other types of ships are unaffected.

In related news, the firepower of ALL the ships have been nerfed super heavily, generally speaking to 1/10th (!) their prior values. In some cases where the values were already low, more like 1/3rd. If this winds up feeling too harsh, please let us know, but ships were basically vaporizing instantly in battle. I think that if anything needs to change, possibly the health on the larger ships now needs to come down, but we’ll see. If fleet ships are dying at a good speed when in battle with each other, then we’re in pretty good shape and just need to figure out how to get the bigger ships to relate to them better.

There are some pretty major bugs that we’ve fixed in this one, which have been around for quite some time. The screen flashing bug, which also had a performance hit, is fixed. The ships shooting off into the ether at nothing is also fixed, and also was at least a mild performance hit. If you see either of those again, please let us know so that we can go in and murder them all over again, but hopefully it won’t come to that; savegames are appreciated on mantis if you find something like that.

Speaking of savegames, we’re not going to be breaking those anymore for a while, after all. Potentially not anymore, period (but no firm promises on that until we get into EA). AI War Classic’s savegames are forward-compatible all the way back to the betas in May 2009, so we have a history of long savegame forward compatibility. 🙂 It has just been a matter of not wanting a lot of cruft in our data files and code right now with all the changes we’ve been making, hence all the recent breakages.

There are a lot of other good fixes in there, too, but it’s late and I’m super tired, so I’ll mostly let you read the release notes yourself. 🙂

Lots more to come this week. Thanks for your support!

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you’ll be notified about any game releases we do.

Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn’t have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that’s how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.

For once I have very little to say — this is mostly just a huge grab bag of fixes and tweaks. Lots of good stuff, but nothing that is singularly amazing on its own. Probably the biggest thing is that ships should no longer cluster up and overkill individual targets like they used to (hence the name of this release). But… there’s a lot of good stuff in here, really. Existing savegames should still work for this version, because we didn’t change as many things as we usually are going to be in this 2ish week period. This was a polish release.

Lots more to come this week. Thanks for your support!

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you’ll be notified about any game releases we do.

Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn’t have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that’s how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.

This particular release is about refinement in the wake of the huge changes that came out on Friday. It needed it, very much so, but still surprisingly not to the degree I would have expected. That was a pleasant surprise! 🙂

A huge portion of these fixes and balance tweaks were actually done over the weekend while I was off with family, which is kinda crazy and cool — volunteer developer Badger, and prolific community member RocketAssistedPuffin directly made a lot of the most important changes here (Puffin was even releasing his fixes as mods over the weekend so that folks could have those changes prior to this new official build rolling out — soooo coooool!).

This one breaks all the savegames, like most of the new releases over the next 2ish weeks are likely to. Apologies in advance, but it’s just a very tumultuous time for a lot of the ships and their mechanics.

I’m not really even sure what to say to summarize this version. Basically it’s “those things that bugged you the most last release are fixed.” There’s also a new auto-kite feature that Badger added, which I think is super helpful.

There are still some issues with the AI not acting properly because the strength values on ships are a bit haphazard, so the AI (and you, if you read the UI) will think that certain matchup are more or less balanced than they really are. Basically some of the ships you have have too much strength and are freaking out the AI because of that (but that strength number isn’t backed up with actual power, it’s all a bluff, basically). I’m going to be redoing how strength is calculated and put in starting tomorrow, and that should solve that issue.

One of the big upcoming things (aside from lots more ships reinventions like you see in this build and the last one) is procedural ships. Semi-procedural, at any rate. Since seeing just how easy the creation and tweaking of existing ships are right now, I’m feeling less inclined to go super-crazy with that, but I do want some element of it there. I’m most excited about the handfuls of new ship abilities that are still outstanding to be added.

Lots more to come this week. Thanks for your support!

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you’ll be notified about any game releases we do.

Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn’t have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that’s how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.

This is actually TWO giant releases in one. Release notes here for the current one, and here for “Break the Sky.”

It’s a whole new game now, as well it ought to be after such a huge amount of time (almost a month!) since the last release. We’ve entered an entirely new phase of development now, which I’m referring to as “The Era of Discovery,” and which is based around the thoughts from that giant essay from two releases ago. Things are coming along really well, although it’s taking a lot longer than I had expected.

Sooo… how on earth do I summarize this? The release notes just for the last two versions are about 12,000 words (39 pages). Well, let’s give it a sh0t:

All the savegames are broken, and we’re going to break them again and again in the next couple of weeks. Please excuse our dust.

The UI is still not done, but is in a vastly superior state now compared to what it was.

However, the tooltips in the UI are in what is a potentially-final state, pending feedback.

Tooltips actually tell you everything now, without giving the same sort of information overload as AIWC.

There are a ton of minor faction changes, big and small, thanks to Badger.

There are a ton of new notifications, and there is also a new objectives tab on the sidebar, with actual data. (Though not ALL the data, yet).

All of the ship balance from before has been stripped away and replaced with something new, simpler, and way more powerful based around the new units of measurement.

The way we store the xml for ships and their systems and related data has been overhauled to an incredible degree, and is now a lot easier to work with.

Even more is coming in terms of unit transformations, hence some of the savegame breakages that you’ll see.

The ship icon gimbals have a bunch of new updates to show shields more prominently, and flair in general more attractively.

Megatons of bugfixes and structural improvements.

Vastly smaller savegames, now.

Much better ship targeting logic, although there’s still more to go on that.

And a whole lot of untested things that we hope you’ll tell us about if they’re broken. 😉

And… yeah. This isn’t quite the point where we want to say “come jump in if you’re waiting for a near-EA release build,” but we’re getting there. We’re headed through the process of cleaning this up and finishing this pretty tectonic set of changes that make this feel like the sequel that we were wanting it to be from the start (while still honoring the original game, which was something that The Pivot — the last phase of the development prior to this one — accomplished).

Lots more to come next week. Thanks for your support!

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you’ll be notified about any game releases we do.

Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn’t have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that’s how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.